Esri Data: Business Locations and Business Summary 2012 Methodology Statement

1. 2012 Methodology Statement:
Esri Data—Business Locations
and Business Summary
An Esri®
White Paper
March 2013

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3. J9940
Esri White Paper i
2012 Methodology Statement:
Esri Data—Business Locations
and Business Summary
An Esri White Paper
Contents Page
Data Sources ......................................................................................... 1
Business Locations................................................................................ 1
Esri's Data Development Team............................................................. 1

5. J9940
Esri White Paper
2012 Methodology Statement:
Esri Data—Business Locations
and Business Summary
Esri extracts its business data from a comprehensive list of businesses
licensed from Dun & Bradstreet®
. This business list contains data on over
18 million US businesses—including the business name, location,
franchise code, industry classification code, number of employees, and
sales volume— current as of July 2012.
Data Sources Dun & Bradstreet utilizes its exclusive DUNSRight™ process that harvests information
from a mix of data sources to collect, maintain, and verify information on
individual establishments. This process leverages Dun & Bradstreet's proprietary
databases, customer-generated information, and publicly available sources such as
business registries, Internet/web mining, news and media reports, telephone directories,
court and legal filings, company financials, banking information, directory assistance,
industry trade data, and telephone interviews.
Esri provides reports and file extracts from the business database that include the industry
classification, employment, and sales. Included are both versions of industry
classification—the former four-digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system and
the updated six-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Dun &
Bradstreet first establishes a proprietary (and more granular) eight-digit SIC code based
on a company's primary source of revenue. Then, the broader six-digit NAICS is
appended to each business record.
Business Locations An address list of businesses is compiled by Dun & Bradstreet from its sources and
telephone verifications. These addresses are geocoded to assign latitude and longitude
coordinates to the business site and appends 2010 Census geographic codes via spatial
overlay. Overall, 95.6 percent of the businesses are geocoded at the address level that
includes coordinates and census block codes.
Esri uses the geographic codes to report business data for summary areas such as states,
counties, census tracts, and block groups. Aggregations by ZIP codes are created from the
business database. ZIP codes from Dun & Bradstreet may differ from the residential ZIP
codes in the Esri® demographic databases because Dun & Bradstreet includes business-
only ZIP codes that are unique to a particular establishment and include no residential
area. The coordinates of each business are used to assign it to a user-defined polygon.
For more information, visit esri.com/businessdata.
Esri's Data
Development Team
Led by chief demographer Lynn Wombold, Esri's data development team has a 30-year
history of excellence in market intelligence. The combined expertise of the team's
economists, statisticians, demographers, geographers, and analysts totals nearly a century

6. 2012 Methodology Statement: Esri Data—Business Locations and Business Summary
J9940
March 2013 2
of data and segmentation development experience. The team has crafted data
methodologies, such as the demographic update, segmentation, the diversity index, and
the Retail MarketPlace database, that are now industry benchmarks.

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